Current Position: Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics (since April 2009)
Credit: Martha Stewart
Why He Matters
When President Barack Obama convened an economic summit in February 2009 at the White House, old Washington hands who attended it were shocked to find the Obama administration adding a surprise to the agenda: improving the Pentagon procurement system. Three days later, Obama kept the surprises coming, announcing his intention to nominate Carter as the Pentagon’s procurement czar. Carter is a physicist and Harvard academic whose only previous Pentagon stint was in a mid-level policy post from 1993 until 1996 under the Clinton administration. Carter oversaw defense acquisition issues for the Obama transition team.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates in April 2009 announced a blueprint fiscal 2010 budget plan that drastically altered Pentagon priorities, shifting money away from expensive, elaborate weapons programs to ones better suited to today's unconventional warfare.In that 2010 defense spending request, Gates canceled or altered plans for nearly 50 major weapon programs.
More changes could be coming. In a Sept. 1, 2009, interview, Carter said the Obama defense team will not hesitate to cancel disappointing multibillion-dollar programs. "Former Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre told me recently, "Don't pay excessive attention to changing processes and boxes; focus on the content of the program, the objective of the program, the health of the program, the technology underlying the program," he said. "My approach to troubled programs is to go at them one-by-one, solve the underlying problems, get them on track. And if they cannot be gotten on track, face the music. If a program is not performing, we need the discipline to end it."
Path to Power
Carter grew up in Philadelphia, Pa., and entered the workforce at age 11 at a car wash. Carter was promptly fired for, in his words, “wise-mouthing the owner.” Carter moved on to various jobs pumping gas, repairing cars, as a hospital orderly and counselor on a suicide hotline. He worked so much as a teenager, in fact, that he “ had little time for myself and even less to do the reading and research that I was craving.”
He got into Yale, but “rather unexpectedly,” he wrote in his Harvard autobiography, adding he “disdained” the “preppies and other privileged students.” In Carter’s own words, he was a serious student, majoring in both physics and medieval history.
After graduating from Yale summa cum laude with his dual degrees, he studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar and earned a doctorate in theoretical physics. Carter then returned to the U.S. to begin a career of “thinking and writing in academia.”
But some defense observers wonder whether Carter is too much of an academic. One defense insider said a senior Pentagon official worried aloud that the Harvard professor will prove to be “the next coming of Wolfowitz," a reference to George W. Bush’s first deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz. Sources say the man known as “Wolfy” had little acquisition or weapons-development experience before entering the Pentagon, and approved a long list of bad program plans.
Pentagon Career
In 1979, Carter reached a turning point in his career: he was persuaded to join the Congressional Office of Technology to study threats from potential Soviet missile strikes on the U.S. He became interested in world affairs, and joined the systems analysis directorate in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
After some at Defense, he joined the Kennedy School’s Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He became CSIA director in the early 1990s. When Bill Clinton won the presidential election that year, his friend, William Perry, became defense secretary and asked him to re-enter the Pentagon. He became the assistant secretary of defense for international security policy from 1993 until 1996. Following that stint, he returned to Harvard and became chairman of the international and global affairs faculty of the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
The Issues
On Feb. 26, 2009, the White House unveiled a $537 billion 2010 defense spending outline, along with plans for a $130 billion war supplemental request that promised to closely examine all major military programs.
It will be the job of the next acquisition czar to lead such examinations. Some defense observers say Carter’s scientific training and deep understanding of complex technologies will be an asset. Recent Pentagon acquisition czars have come from business or government management backgrounds. Carter should be able to determine when a service or its industry partner is over-promising on plans for a brand new weapons system, a common problem that drives up program costs.
Key Weapons Systems
During its final year, the Bush administration punted several key decisions with broad implications — ones that might have curtailed planned production or terminated several major U.S. defense programs — to the new president. The Bush team also delayed awarding several contracts and re-starting several major weapons system competitions.
Carter arrived at the Pentagon too late to affect the fiscal 2010 Pentagon budget plan. Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced on April 6, 2009, that the Navy would buy only three more DDG-1000 destroyers and then revert to an older class of ship; halt production of the Air Force's F-122 fighter jets at 187; and curtail spending on some high-tech weapons programs included in the Army's Future Combat Systems programs.
Carter has inherited an already controversial race between American-based Boeing and Northrop Grumman and its European partner EADS to replace the service’s aging KC-135s. The Pentagon acquisition chief said DoD officials will launch a new competition this fall and will "go right down the middle. As the secretar has said: free, fair and transparent." The latest attempt at buying new tankers will come at a time when the economic crisis has some U.S. lawmakers ramping up protectionist rhetoric.
Acquisition Reform
As the Pentagon acquisition czar, Carter oversees a weapons-buying system that Obama has placed at the top of his list of federal programs he wants to fix. There is little doubt in defense circles about the state of the Pentagon’s broken acquisition system. Gates is fond of noting that over 130 studies on the subject have been done over the last few decades, but “to no avail .”
For decades, countless experts have turned out hefty reports and grand pledges about reigning in a DOD acquisition system that routinely produces programs that are way over budget and years behind schedule. But no progress has been made. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama vowed to finally fix the problem. Gates and other Obama defense officials have talked since the Nov. 5, 2008, election about using more prototyping (meaning contractors competing for a contract would build versions of their proposed weapon systems, which DOD could then judge), independent cost assessments, among other steps.Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, told a House panel the White House will leave the details of the reform plan to Gates.
Since then, however, the defense secretary has produced little on the subject except the 50 decisions contained in the 2010 spending plan. Carter told Defense News in September 2009 that defense observers should not expect to see the Obama administration make the same kinds of changes to the Pentagon procurement system as the Clinton and Bush administrations. "Most acquisition reform efforts look at the [beginning phase of a major weapons program]. The most recent acquisition reform legislation did so, and very constructively, but there are these other two pieces, as well," the acquisition chief said.
His approach? "No fiddling with the system, no moving boxes, no changing process is a substitute for good discipline, common sense, and above all, good people involved in the process. Any acquisition reform effort, or proposal that doesn’t have those three ingredients probably isn’t going to get anywhere" in the Obama Pentagon, he said.
Industrial Base
Some Republican lawmakers and defense experts criticized Gates' April 2009 decisions because he did not prioritize the impact on the industrial base. In the September 2009 interview, however, Carter said he will examine how weapons-program decisions will impact U.S. industry. "I feel industrial base issues are completely legitimate because having the best defense industrial and technology base in the world is not a birthright," Carter said. "It’s something we have to earn again and again, and that’s particularly true in a globalizing and commercializing world. ... It’s not about jobs, it’s about certain kinds of jobs – very rare kinds of skills that are not easily replicated in the commercial world and if allowed to erode would be difficult to rebuild."
Driving the criticism of Gates' decisions is the fact the engineering, design and production prowess housed in American defense firms is largely approaching retirement age with a smaller number of younger replacements. That means, Carter said, the Pentagon might be forced to fund some work on special systems like stealthy fighters and bombers, and space systems, just to keep alive industry's ability to produce them down the road.
The Network
Carter might be considered more of a newcomer to defense acquisition issues than were his recent predecessors, but he is already well known to other Obama senior national security aides. He has worked closely with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
Michele Flournoy and Deputy Secretary of State
James Steinberg on several projects. The same is true for
Susan E. Rice, Obama’s pick for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as well as
Louis Caldera, who is the former head of the White House’s Military oOffice.
Carter has also collaborated with
John Podesta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff who now runs the left-leaning Center for American Progress, from which many of Obama’s new faces have come.
Carter has worked well with some Republicans, having written op-eds with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman
Richard Lugar (R-Ind.).
Defense sources say one of the biggest proponents of the new the acquisition czar is William Perry, who was President Clinton’s defense secretary and is Considered one of Carter’s mentors. The two are co-directors of the Preventive Defense Project, a product of cooperation between Harvard and Stanford universities.
Campaign Contributions
Carter has donated primarily to Democratic politicians since 2000, according to the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics.
He donated $6,900 to then-Sen.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) in 2007 and 2008. He gave the same amount to then Sen.
Barack Obama (D-Ill.) during that same span.
Carter also donated $1,500 to Indiana GOPer Lugar in 2007, and another $2,650 to the Indiana Republican in 2006. During the 2004 presidential cycle, Carter donated to three Democratic candidates: $1,000 to retired Gen. Wesley Clark and $2,000 to former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) and $1,000 to Sen.
Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.). In 2000, he gave two $500 contributions to Democratic Sen.
Jane Harman (D-Calif.), a top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
